Our journey so far continued...Australia – Western Australia, Northern Territory, New South Wales & Queensland.

April 2011

28th – After a night spent at Christchurch airport amid the excitement of the grand opening of the brand new international terminal building, we flew to Melbourne. Dodgy flight times secure us a day spent in Melbourne airport until our flight to Perth to spend another night at theirs. Cost of food? $32. Cost of hot showers? $10. Cost of research in preparation for ‘The Terminal 2’ film auditions? Priceless.

29th – Picked up campervan and explored Perth city centre, which, considering it is the biggest city on the west coast, was surprisingly quiet. Stopped at Fremantle, the second biggest city after Perth and home to the late ACDC frontman Bon Scott and which, incidentally, was decidedly busier than Perth. Found an expensive but shite campsite where we were asleep by 7pm, exhausted from our airport escapades.

30th – Explored Coogee beach and moved up the road to Rockingham to spend the night. Just after cooking dinner and settling down by the beach, mad eccentric Kiwi woman walking dogs offers us her driveway for the night and free hot shower in the morning. Nice lady. Crazy, but nice.

May 2011

1st  – Spent the day in Rockingham. Found sweetshop selling English sweetie fayre, including the English pub staple (apart from beer of course), Scampi Fries. Get in! Cadburys Fudge for dessert completed a taste of home.

2nd – Drove a 700km round trip into the bush to visit Wave Rock, a rock formation shaped like a giant wave by rainwater running off the top of the rock over God knows how many years. Pretty cool. Obligatory photo pretending to surf it secured.

3rd – Spent the day on Coogee beach and Fremantle.

4th – Returned to Perth to fly to Alice Springs and spent the first night in a real bed for weeks in a hostel whose expensive rooms would have afforded us five star luxury in Asia. Walked to the food store and witnessed the drunk Aboriginals we were pre-advised we would see on the street on the way home but we decided we liked them and their jolly demeanor, possessed despite being the recipients of a sad and turbulent history. Disappointed to find yet more Aussies not drinking Fosters, mind, native or not.

5th – Picked up campervan and received a free upgrade which included a microwave. Welcome to the 21^st Century. Explored Alice Springs, which we really liked, and got on the road toward Ayers Rock around 3pm (see related Roadkill blog). Stayed at Curtin Springs, where a mice infestation had taken over the place and all doors couldn’t be opened for more than the time it took to dive in or out.

 6th – Day at Uluru (Ayers Rock). Seemingly just a rock, Uluru has sacred significance for Aboriginal peoples of the area and it didn’t disappoint both as a spectacle and hallowed ground from which we learned so much historically. Great place that we highly recommend, if only for the drive from Alice Springs, which satisfies the pre-conceived image of Australia we all have.

7th – Woke at sparrow’s fart to see a dud sunrise at Uluru and hit the Olgas, another huge, interesting and culturally significant rock formation nearby, before heading back to Alice Springs. Drove as far as our eyelids would allow and were finally ordered by them to stop at Stuarts Well campsite, where the on-site bar is home to Dinky, the famous ‘Singing Dingo’ – a Chaz and Dave style act who has previously starred with none other than Michael Caine. My name is Michael Caine…

8th – Drove the 90km back to Alice Springs to hand back the campervan and flew to Sydney to spend another night in an airport.

9th – Collected yet another campervan and hit the classic tourist trail of the Australian east coast which included Bondi Beach, the Opera House and Manley via the ferry, at which time it decided to piss it down and stifle those much heralded world class views of the harbor. Great. Thanks very much. Where's Ron Burgundy when you need him!

10th – Went back to Sydney Harbour and visited the botanical gardens for classic postcard view of bridge and Opera House. Luckily the sun had his hat on. Drove up the coast to Palm Beach, a beautiful area reminiscent of those seen in American made-for-TV Danielle Steel productions. Also known to those of you more culturally challenged as the setting for the famous Australian soap Home & Away.

11th – Drove all day and tried to do the Pacific Highway some justice. We felt that we did just that by visiting such important and significant sites as The Big Banana at Coffs Harbour and Big Prawn at Ballina, just two examples among a number of Australia’s strange and odd, but much photographed, ‘big things’.

12th – Continued north on the Pacific Highway and hit the stunning Byron Bay, Australia’s most easterly point. Notably, it was named so by Captain Cook after the Poet and renowned Navigator Lord Byron in the 1760s. Also hit the start of the Gold Coast and visited the essential, gaudy, built-up Surfer’s Paradise, home of the Quiksilver Pro surfing competition. Drove on flyover through Brisbane, which afforded great night views of the city we wished we had time to see.

13th – Paid 80 squid (yes 80 pounds!!) to gain entry into Australia Zoo, home of the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin. Sadly, as we all know, he wasn’t there to greet us but Helen hugged a Koala instead and we both hand-fed Kangaroos, which was great. Incidentally, we both observed, since their fur is so soft they’d make great rugs. Sorry Skippy. Met the appropriately named Croc, and Steve’s ‘baby’, Aggro, who has the distinction of destroying 4 lawnmowers to date while handlers mow his compound. Good work Aggro. Also visited upmarket Noosa Heads where backpackers didn’t belong so we high-tailed it to Rainbow beach for the next-day trip to Fraser Island.

14th – Day trip to Fraser Island. Created by over 800, 000 years of drifting sands, it is an “ecological wonderland” and a World Heritage-listed site that consists of a 120km-long area of lush rainforest, ruggedly beautiful beach, 200m high sand dunes and mineral-rich pools of freshwater. Respect has to be paid, though, to the fierce undercurrent of the shark and croc-infested waters, which is why a swim in the stunning waters of Lake McKenzie, among others, is obviously preferred. The Dingoes here are the purest of their species too, having not had the chance to breed with anything else. Interestingly, Dingoes are a wolf, not a dog, since they howl and not bark. Bet ya didn’t know that. Neither did we.

15th – Went to the excellently-named Tin Can Bay to feed dolphins at breakfast. Ever since an injured dolphin was brought to the bay and nursed back to health, it has been visiting every morning for free food. Lazy bugger. One day he brought a friend along and they have both been turning up for breakfast ever since. Visitors pay $5 for a small fish to feed them and the small café does a roaring trade. It is a small marina and this is a small daily event, which is incredibly refreshing that something has remained as such, given that most everything else that has commercial value gets too big and turns into something just for the wonga. Drove to Rockhampton.

16th – Drove to Mackay, start of the Whitsunday coast and arrived at Airlie beach, the conventional base for exploring the Whitsunday Islands.

17th – Spent a well-earned day relaxing at the campsite. Decided to hold off on going out to the Whits until the following day since the weather was not looking too clever. Slightly alarming was the sight of a massive black and yellow reptile climb down from one of the trees not more than 20ft from our pitch.

18th – Hit the Whitsundays and were glad we chose a motorboat rather than a yacht as it was incredibly choppy.  However, we couldn’t hide our disappointment when we discovered that the white sand swirls for which the Whits are famous were covered by a very high tide of 4 metres owing to a full moon (high tide is apparently usually a max of 2 metres). We concluded, just like practically everywhere on this trip, that it is best seen from the air. We did meet two very nice girls from New Zealand, Cathleen and Megan, who salvaged the day.  We enjoyed their company so much we met them for dinner too.

19th – Drove to Bowen, Australia. Where the hell is that, you ask? Why would you want to go there, you say? Well, Bowen has a rather recent claim to fame as the place chosen to represent Darwin for the film Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. If you’ve seen the film, it was plain to see by the buildings that still stand as regular banks, hotels and shops. They were simply given a temporary makeover while tons of red sand was shipped in to make it look authentic. The jetty, used to represent the bombings on Darwin harbor, comes alive with a little imagination too. After our brush with Hollywood, we headed up to Townsville for a pit stop before making tracks.

20th – Visited Tully, the wettest place in Australia, where the height of a big gumboot illustrates the obsession of building ‘big things’, as mentioned earlier, and is predominantly used to show how much rainfall the town receives each year - the most in Australia. And it was pretty big. It didn’t rain while we were there though. Imagine that – the Brits didn’t bring the weather with them. Arrived in Cairns, our final destination along the east coast of Australia.

21st – We went on a trip to see and snorkel the Great Barrier Reef that actually turned out to be anything but great. Obviously we had high hopes for viewing the world under the sea at a reef you would imagine is the ultimate place to do so, but it turned out to be colourless and, frankly, we’ve seen better reef and fish from the beach. Disappointing.

22nd – Spent the day in Cairns and explored waterfront and surrounding area. Flew to Brisbane to spend night in airport on some really comfortable leather sofas so we actually got some decent sleep. Bonza!

23rd – Flew to Auckland to catch connecting flight to Rarotonga, Cook Islands. Weirdly, thanks to the Dateline, we flew on a Monday evening from Auckland and arrived at twenty past midnight in Rarotonga…on a Monday! Great. As if Mondays aren’t bad enough.

Kauri Tree Nazis

While we were on New Zealand’s north island, we took the opportunity to visit a few of a handful of remaining Kauri trees in the Waipoua Forest. Years of logging the forests severely reduced the numbers of these giants, which are among the most ancient in the world. In fact, the antecedents of the kauri appeared during the Jurassic period (between 190 and 135 million years ago). Anyway, the largest remaining tree is approximately 1200 years old and still growing.

Now, to state the obvious, this tree has been around for a very long time, long before the department of conservation was ever dreamed up. People have undoubtedly lived around, near or underneath the tree, walked and tramped around it, hugged it, danced around it, attempted to climb it and hunted in its vicinity for all this time and yet it still lives. Pretty tough and hardy I’d say. Not according to the DOC who some time ago, as soon as the Kauri Forest was promoted as a tourist attraction, put signs up declaring that “the feeding roots of Kauri trees are shallow and delicate. Walking off the formed protective paths and boardwalks can kill these giant trees.” So let me get this straight, for thousands of years this tree has happily co-existed with indigenous peoples and has miraculously been spared the blade of the logger’s saw, and now, after all this time, walking around it may kill it? Unreal. Just another example of controlling the masses. The nanny state comes out to play again.

 

This kind of bureaucracy is also applied to spring water, which has sat protected several metres below the ground for thousands of years. Filtered by mineral-rich rocks, and preserved in its own spring, it is usually the purest water known to man and the longer it is left, the more minerals it absorbs. That is until we extract it for commercial sale and slap an expiry date on it. Our water of choice in NZ was ‘Waiwera’, bottled spring water that was voted “the world’s best water” by Decanter Magazine, 2008. On the strip label at the back it states that “GOOD TASTE TAKES TIME…15,000 years, in this case (by carbon dating). The natural artesian water you are about to drink predates civilization in New Zealand, not to mention the last ice age. Which makes it about as pure as you could find anywhere on the planet.” The best before date on the mid-section of the bottle read “30 MAR 2013.”

Overrated New Zealand

Of all the countries we have visited on our expedition, probably the most disappointing has been New Zealand. However, before you throw your arms around and screw up your face in incredulous disbelief, read on. We are not philistines, who cannot appreciate what is in front of them, nor do we like to go against the grain just because everybody is going a certain way. Simply, we think New Zealand is overrated. Let me explain. Have you ever been to see a film after you have spoken to various people and read numerous reviews that have told you how amazing it is and, in doing so, inadvertently hyped the film to the point where you had to see it and you were consequently expecting big things from it? And then all your expectations accumulated into anti-climax and disappointment when you discovered that, while the film was really good and you were glad you went to see it, there was no way it could have lived up to all the hype it was receiving through various forms? I’m sure you came away wishing that you had held no pre-conceived ideas about the film so you could have formed your own opinions about it. Know what I mean? Well, this is exactly how we felt about New Zealand.

There is no doubt in our minds that New Zealand is a beautiful country on both islands and it would be hard to convince you otherwise on account of the photos we recently posted but the fact is, any remark by anyone previous to our visit there usually consisted of something like ‘I loved it’ or ‘New Zealand is amazing’ or ‘I want to emigrate there,’ and so on. So, as you can imagine, we went there with all kinds of positive expectations that no country could live up to. What we found was that the north island looked a lot like Wales in terms of the green hills full of sheep (incidentally there is actually 40 million sheep to 4 million people in NZ), ruggedly beautiful deserted beaches and small, scarcely populated villages of not-so friendly people. Unlike in Wales though, New Zealand’s towns and villages contained little or no historical value and consisted of faceless, pre-fabricated buildings, which consequently formed places seriously lacking in soul or character. The south island is more alpine with mountains and glaciers, glacial lakes and the kind of scenery that comes with it. Certain places of interest billed as “voted number one in New Zealand’s 100 must-see places to visit” paled in comparison to those you might see in, say, Canada. And therein lay the problem. Without trying to sound pompous and conceited, we have been across the Canadian Rockies. We have seen this kind of scenery before in a place that is even more epic. We acknowledge that to not evaluate it in its own right and compare it was unfair, but that is exactly what we couldn’t help doing since the scenery was so similar to places we have been, either those attached to England or across the Atlantic.

 

There is another aspect to my argument here, in addition to the country being unhelpfully overhyped for us. Those who professed to us that New Zealand is amazing undoubtedly visited on holiday with a significantly different monetary budget. When you are able to pay for skydiving, bungee jumps, helicopter rides over glaciers and every boat trip offered around a lake, of course it’s going to be bloody amazing! If we were on holiday there is no doubt those things are exactly what we would have done too. But it brings up an interesting consideration. Why should a place be amazing because of the things you did? Can’t it be amazing without them? If the answer is no then surely the place itself is not actually that amazing. After all, when it comes down to it, in the grand scheme of tourism a holiday is a chance to meet a country’s representative – its metaphorical sales rep who will show and sell all the good bits while everything else gets conveniently and temporarily shoved in a corner until you’re gone. To see what a country and its people is really like, one would have to spend a significant amount of time there assimilating into society and allowing it to get under their skin. I am not suggesting that we have been able to do that in many of the places we have been to, such is the nature of our trip, but perhaps we would have liked some of them more if we had spent extended amounts of time there, even New Zealand. It is important to form an opinion of a country as it is with no ideas pre-attached but in this technological day and age, where one can acquire information from inescapable amounts of communication, this is impossible. What I am sure of, though, is that those countries we visited with little or no preconceptions about them very often left us with very positive and favourable views, enough to make us want to go back there. And more often than not, it is the people of a place that significantly determined our opinions of it – the old adage that it is the people that make a place is truer than you can imagine.

Our journey so far continued...New Zealand.

April 2011

4th – Flew to Auckland to pick up Harakeke, our campervan for the next twenty-something days. Got supplies and went to Otamure to spend the night with high hopes for NZ.

 5th – Spent a lazy morning at the beach and drove north to the Bay of Islands.

6th – Sailed around the islands on an 80ft sailing boat built for the late Sir Peter Blake to compete in the 1985/86 Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race, in which it finished second. It also won the 1984 Sydney to Hobart Race. Brilliant experience being on such a fantastic boat and even had a pod of several dolphins playing around the bow on our outward journey. Bonus! Also paid for an incredibly disappointing Maori culture display. Booo!

7th – Drove north again to Cape Reinga, the northern-most tip of the north island and walked about 100 metres of 90-mile beach.

8th – Drove south from Hokianga area to Wenderholme to visit more rustic beaches.

9th – Drove to Auckland.

10th – Drove to the Coromandel Peninsula and visited Cathedral Cove and had a bizarre and surreal experience at the originally named Hot Water Beach where you dig a hole, which fills up with hot water and hey presto, you have your own personal hot spring.

11th – Drove to Rotorua.

12th – Visited one of many thermal geoparks around Rotorua. Unique experience exploring the geothermal activity for which geologists would turn down sex.

13th – Went to Lake Taupo, a beautiful lake in a volcanic crater containing crystal clear water where we had a swim while keeping a keen eye on any volcanic activity.

14th – Wellington, aka the windy city. Visited Te Papa museum and saw the world’s only giant squid on display. And it was a giant.

15th – Ferry to south island where we immediately found a spot to grab a few hours sleep as a night in the queue for the ferry the night before was hardly profitable. Drove west to Nelson and stayed at what amounted to nothing more than a trailer park. No wonder it was a bargain.

16th – Visited much heralded national park, Abel Tasman. Or at least it would have been if it wasn’t pissing it down with rain. Went for an hour’s walk but essentially, owing to the weather, nothing to see here people, move on.

17th – Drove the wild and woolly west coast and visited the ‘pancake rocks’ and Hokitika beach that contained more driftwood than we had ever seen and made us ponder over the possibilities. Slept at lake Mahinapua.

18th – Went to Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. Fox glacier, incidentally, was named after a former Prime Minister Sir William Fox, who narcissistically named it after himself in 1872. Interestingly, Franz Josef usually advances at a rate of one metre per day, but sometime ramps up to five metres per day – ten times faster than the Swiss Alps' glaciers. Visited Kiwi sanctuary to see the fiercely nocturnal New Zealand icons.

19th – Drove from Fox Glacier to Lake Wannaka where we met many retired Americans touring in shoebox campervans so removed from what they’re used to. Don and Judy from Texas, for example, usually roll in a full-size rockstar-style bus that makes a National Express look small, while towing a full-size Hummer behind. Unbelievable. Well, what else are they gonna drive around in, it is Texas!

21st – Drove to Queenstown, the extreme sports capital, which was more akin to a snowy resort in the Alps except, because of the time of year, there was no snow. Explored pretty town and ate fish and chips on the lake front.

22nd – Drove to Te Anu to stay the night before heading out to Milford Sound the following morning.

23rd – Drove to Milford Sound, a picturesque but overrated experience that frankly, wasn’t worth the long drive. It was overcast and raining on the day we went, which was supposed to be the best conditions for seeing the area but the jury is well and truly out on this one. Of course, since the weather is regularly like this here, my cynical side tells me that they have to promote this or they’ll have no visitors. My realistic side bluntly acknowledges that the whole thing is bollocks.

24th – Drove to Dunedin and the Otago peninsula to see Yellow-Eyed Penguins. Usually one has to jump on the tourist conveyor belt that pulls wads of money out of your pocket as you move along just to see these little guys. But we read about a beach where we could see them for free and in their most natural surroundings. It was a bit of a trek but we saw two clumsily make their way up the dunes to their burrows. At the end of the same beach, big male sealions noisily fought for dominance by butting chests and barking. Scary. But we did get to pretend we were David Attenborough for a brief spell and that was worth it alone.

25th – We went to a beach to see the quirky Moereki boulders, huge and cool marble-like rocks formed over thousands of years of weathering that were the subject of a long photoshoot. Visited Omaru, also known as Penguin Town for their obvious public displays of affection for the little critters. Drove to Christchuch to spend the night.

 
26th – Drove to Kaikoura, a place famous for the whales that pass through during migration and subject place for the brilliant film Whale Rider. Must-see film by the way. Stayed at Christchurch again.

27th – After getting the van sorted for handing back we hit Christchurch, though we had significantly less of an impact than the volcano a couple of months previous. Weirdly, random scattered buildings were affected rather than a concentrated area but the devastation was plain to see nevertheless. Flew to Perth to continue our Aussie adventure.